Best thing I've cooked in a while - vegan 'crab cakes'

Sorry for the radio silence of late - working, studying and moving house has taken its toll on my beloved cooking and blogging. Nyargh! And other such noises of frustration!

Well, it's a new year, so let's start again - here's another post (hopefully the last!) on the joys of clearing out cupboards.

One recent sacrifice to the cause of clearing out my kitchen before moving house was hearts of palm. Due to the expense of these white tubular wonders, I quite often buy a can of them and save it for a special recipe. Well, recently I found a really special recipe indeed.

In Kris Carr's Crazy Sexy Kitchen, there's a recipe for crab cakes and remoulade that called out to turn my hearts of palm into something a little bit fancy.

I don't think I've ever eaten crab cakes at any point in my life, or any crab cake substitute, for that matter, so how this compares I don't know. This was a great way to break my 'crab cakes' duck, and even better, they're not too tricky to make: just mash up the palm hearts with onion, pepper and seasonings, and chill them for a bit before shallow frying.

That deliciously pink sauce that goes with them is described in the book as remoulade, but it's more like a marie rose sauce with serious attitude.

Both the crab cakes and the sauce were delicious and you need to eat them right now. The crab cakes are rich, creamy and slightly decadent, a gentle canvas for the tangy fun of the sauce. If you've got a copy of that cookbook and you've not made these yet, you need to find a mirror, take a long hard look at yourself, then go get that unloved can from the back of your pantry.

The Crazy, Sexy Kitchen recipe next to the crab cakes and sauce is a farmers salad of beans, potatoes and watercress. Unlike the crab cakes recipe, which I followed to the letter, I had to tweak the salad to fit with what I had in my fridge. It was still lovely, and you can see it up there.

Between them, they were some of the nicest things I've put in my stomach recently. If I was the sort of person that had dinner parties, I'd serve this up as a starter. As I'm not that kind of person, I'm just going to keep making them for myself, and dammit, I'll stab anyone who tries to take a bite in the back of the hand with my fork.